Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

*The Meaning of American Factories
NewRepublic | David Sessions | 04/02/18

After decades of plant closures and anti-union politics, why does heavy industry symbolize prosperity?

Four decades after the first predictions of "post-industrial society," industrial factories have once again returned to Americans' collective consciousness. Where they once symbolized power, pride, and progress, they are now icons of decline: jobs lost, communities decimated, a period of prosperity that turned out to be all too brief. In the American Midwest and in pockets across Europe, voters who once supported left-leaning parties have increasingly turned to candidates who promise industrial revival wrapped in ethnonationalism.

It's hard to imagine that these voters are longing for the conditions that most factory workers today are subjected to. In the new centers of industrial production--Mexico, China, and Vietnam among others--factory work utterly lacks the aura it had in mid-century America, and workers endure authoritarian conditions that recall a much earlier period. Meanwhile, many sectors in the United States now subject their employees to industrial-style discipline. The warehouses of companies like Lidl and Amazon combine hyper-regulated, mentally and physically exhausting work with ruthless metrics and pitiable pay. ... Read more

America's dysfunctional immigration court system forces many children to appear in court alone. | John Oliver | 04/01/18 | 17:51

*The 200-Year Legal Struggle That Led to Citizens United
NewRepublic | Kim Phillips-Fein | 03/29/18

How businesses campaigned to win constitutional rights and expand their political reach

More than 100 years ago, at the height of the last Gilded Age, Congress passed its first law prohibiting corporations from spending money to influence election campaigns. From the start, the wealthy chafed against this limit, and some sought to test it in court. Alcohol manufacturers -- terrified of high taxes and Prohibition -- might not have seemed the ideal candidates to take on this fight. But they were nonetheless the first to challenge the law, contributing cash to candidates in state and federal races and then arguing that any effort to keep money out of politics was no less than an unconstitutional limitation on free speech.

At that time, state and federal courts rejected these arguments out of hand. To the Michigan Supreme Court, for example, it was self-evident that a local brewery had no "right to participate" in elections. ... Read more

*Teenagers: Saving Our Country So You Don't Have To | Seth Meyers | older, 03/22/18 | 2:47

Thanks to Climate Disruption, Earth Is Already Losing Critical Biosphere Components
Truth-out | By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | 04/02/18

Half of all plants and animals in global forests are forecast to disappear by 2100. The Arctic is in meltdown as human-caused global warming threatens to melt more than one-third of all glaciers. And the biosphere is convulsing as runaway climate disruption marches on under the business-as-usual approach of the world's most powerful government and corporate forces.

Here is the gist of what I said: Based on years of research for my forthcoming book, The End of Ice, along with my work compiling these monthly climate disruption dispatches for four years now, I know that by 2050, we will be inhabiting a dramatically different planet. I believe we will already have tens -- if not hundreds -- of millions of climate refugees from sea-level rise and conflicts born of lack of food and water. What we currently call extreme weather events (massive floods, droughts, hurricanes) will have long since become the norm. In the US, growing food in the Midwest and the central valley of California will be extremely difficult, if not largely impossible, due to shifting weather patterns of rainfall and drought. Some swaths of the world, including the Gulf states in the Middle East and parts of the US Southwest, will be largely uninhabitable due to simply being too hot. Greenland and the Antarctic will both be experiencing dramatically advanced melting, and most of the glaciers in the contiguous 48 US states will have long since ceased to exist. And given that we are officially already amidst the Sixth Mass Extinction Event of the planet, which humans triggered, the biological annihilation that comes with this is happening apace. ... Read more